Nearly half of California teachers who were surveyed plan to retire or quit in the next 10 years. Nationwide, an estimated 35% of teachers plan to leave the profession in the next decade, Kurtz said.
The findings are similar to a survey released in January by the California Teachers Association. It found that while a majority of teachers are satisfied with their job, 40% are considering leaving education within the next few years — nearly half for financial reasons.
Teacher morale is increasingly important as states continue to struggle with teacher shortages, especially in hard-to-fill jobs like special education, science, technology, math, engineering and bilingual education.
Teachers listed improved student behavior as the second most important factor for improving teacher morale. Three-quarters of elementary school teachers, 61% of middle school teachers and 54% of high school teachers surveyed said student behavior is getting worse.
Discipline problems were the result of a perfect storm of factors that worsened when students lost socialization during the pandemic and when schools shifted to restorative justice models of discipline that weren’t always communicated well to teachers or implemented with the necessary resources, Kurtz said.
More than half of the teachers who took the survey said improving student behavior would boost their morale. They called for restrictions on students’ use of cellphones and other personal devices, tougher consequences for students who misbehave, limits on parents’ ability to undermine those consequences and instruction for parents on teaching their children to behave in school.
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